The Parade
Uma Breakdown
It is ethically unacceptable for anyone operating in the field of subjectivity to shelter - as so many do - behind a transferential neutrality whose professed basis is the corpus of scientific work that has achieved mastery over the unconscious: unacceptable not least because any 'psychoanalytical domain' is grounded in the extension of - 'interfaces' with - the domains of the aesthetic.
Félix Guattari
Art ought to be like one's beloved out of reach, out of the world. Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.
J.-K. Huysmans
Performance [is] an opportunity to save something.
Eileen Myles
The performance begins with a declaration of solidarity with the people of Palestine, currently surviving what is at time of writing, the 9th month of genocide. It’s important to begin with this statement, and to echo it in this written response. Important, because many individuals and organisations within the industries of art are visibly supporting this genocide ( through platforming, through excusing, through omitting, through appealing to neutrality, through silence). So before anything else, the artwork Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies by Rabindrath X Bhose, Belladonna Paloma, and Oren Shoesmith contextualises itself as vocal solidarity and a refusal to tuck behind the cover of neutrality that art structures might offer.
In the first part of the artwork, where guests are welcomed to a small wood and bog at an affluent edge of Glasgow, the above declaration is joined by two other statements which overlap and frame the work. I will paraphrase these as: ‘If you are here then this is your bog’, and ‘this artwork is born of grief work’. These three elements stay with me throughout the duration of the artwork; unambiguous solidarity, collective belonging, the creative repurposing of psychoanalytic structures of grief.
On its descriptive surface, Disreputable Bodies is a guided walk through three stations set up in Lenzie Moss, a nature reserve in East Dunbartonshire. At each station is a large hand-painted banner where the artists hold a fixed position together and deliver three variations of an address that is partly transcribed on the gowns they wear (made of the same hand-dyed material as the banners). Three stations, three positions, three variations. That's it, on its surface.
Beneath this though, at the subterranean level of affect, the artwork loops through explorations of collective care and grief for humans and non-humans alike. This is an affective part of the work through its sincere, welcoming and informal tone. As I walk through the woodland with the artists, the audience (no one speaks above a whisper, even as we walk between the stations), various animals, birds and insects I understand the overlap of those three elements mentioned above as being one of repair. Early on, all present are offered an ointment that the artists had produced in Shetland, a ‘Bog Bean Benediction’. The distinction between a blessing, a salve, and a ward seem to flatten when this is applied to my wrists and temples.
At each station the artists carefully pose themselves in stylised positions before reading. It's a kind of Tableau Vivant, pointing as much to that mechanism’s deployment to circumvent morality laws as its position in art history and the queer cinema of Derek Jarman and Sergei Parajanov. Once again it's a light, welcoming touch that sets us all (artists, audience, landscape) just beyond, just out of reach of any mechanisms we might need to escape from. Disreputable Bodies is made of objects, actions and words, but what it does is create (as opposed to claim) a space.
In 1935 while Italian Fascists invaded Ethiopia and were met by lacklustre international reprisals, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein put forward the concept of the ‘depressive position’, a psychic space which one oscillates to in order to repair (Klein, 1935). Towards the end of her live queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick will redeploy this concept, emphasising the creative processes it necessitates:
The depressive position is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting; This is the position from which it is possible to turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or “repair” the murderous part-objects into something like a whole - though I would emphasize not necessarily like any preexisting whole. (Sedgwick, 2002)
I’m deliberately not addressing the words spoken by the artists at each station as I feel to do so is to do a disservice. What will inevitably be absent in my retelling will be the ‘Collective Effervescence of The Bog’ that contextualised the recitations as unprecious yet sincere. This is the way the artwork forms at this time, every part of it meant with great care while every part of it could be tossed to the wind without concern, because the only vital thing is underneath it all.
I’ve also avoided using the term ‘performance’ because of this affective quality which has more in common with a friend taking you to see their secret place in the city, and then telling you the story of why it is important to them. On the way home I recall when I was a teenager my best (and only other sober queer) friend and I would regularly meet at midnight bringing bags containing only water, portable minidisc players, and a video camera to use as crude night vision. We would then walk the non-residential edges of the small town through the night, in a silence enforced by headphones playing hours of Autechre, expressing our love for one another with the basic BSL acquired from working in care. We climbed through the edges of industry, walked private hunting woodlands to their hidden ponds, or hiked miles up the train tracks to get into barns where we would lay on the straw near the cows until just before the farm woke at dawn.
It's this context, which is explicitly queer, rural and amorphously spiritual that I recognised in Lenzie Moss. When I was a teenager, those nighttime rituals were about forming a space in which to undertake the formless creative processes of repair, and Sedgwick tells us, another name ‘for the reparative process is love’ (Sedgwick, 2002). Disreputable Bodies deploys the same reparative process on a larger more open scale. Not the insular mirror structure of the duo, but fuzzy edged multiplicity of the borderless parade where as many beings as are present can take part for as long or as much as they need. It's also how I understood that above everything, in that overlapping centre between solidarity, belonging, and the redeployment of grief, Disreputable Bodies is an artwork about love.
Félix Guattari, ‘The Three Ecologies’ (Chris Turner, Trans.), 1989, New Formations 8, 131–147.
J.-K. Huysmans, Là-Bas (Down There), Dedalus, 1986.
Melanie Klein, ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, 1935, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16, 145–174.
Eileen Myles, Inferno: (A poet’s novel), 2013, OR Books LLC.
Eve-Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in M. A. Barale, J. Goldberg, & M. Moon (Eds.), Touching Feeling, Duke University Press, 123–151.